It is well-known to provide safety gates for doorways or staircases to prevent the passage therethrough of small children, infants, or pets. One common design for a safety gate includes horizontal frame members which can be expanded sufficiently to place friction pads provided on each end of the horizontal frame members into frictional engagement with the vertical surfaces or walls provided in the doorway or staircase. Such designs for safety gates have several disadvantages. First of all, there is the scenario where the horizontal frame member is not adjusted properly to provide a tight enough fit with the walls. In this case, the gate is not sturdily attached to the walls and, thus, is not very safe as it can be easily pushed over or otherwise defeated by a child or pet. In addition, since such safety gates may sometimes be used at the top of a flight of stairs, an unintended release of the gate from the walls can be disastrous.
Many such designs do not work well in situations where the opposed walls are not exactly parallel, a situation which is not altogether uncommon. In such cases, one of the horizontal frame members may make better frictional contact with the walls than the other horizontal frame member, causing a situation in which the safety gate can also be easily defeated.
Even if the safety gate is properly adjusted to make very tight frictional contact with the opposed walls, the paint or other finish on the opposed walls may be damaged by the friction pads. Lastly, it may be inconvenient to repeatedly have to disconnect and reconnect such compression safety gates when passage through the gate is required by an adult.
Another class of safety gate designs typically includes a more permanent mounting of the gate to one opposed wall and some type of latch to the opposite opposed wall. Typically, the latch may include a mechanism such as a hook and eye combination or other similar mechanism. Such designs also have their inherent drawbacks. First, the locking mechanism may not be adequately secure and may be easily defeated by the child or pet. Second, such gates may not be easily removable from the doorway or staircase when it is not desired to have a gate present at all.
It is against this background, and the desire to solve the problems of the prior art, that the present invention has been developed.